tinged with the sort of schoolboy admiration younger men often form for older ones. Balding as a forty-year-old when he first came to Homicide, now at fifty Hart was just plain bald. He brushed his remaining gray hairs straight back and out of the way, and meeting him, you saw his handsome, ram-jawed, granitic head as a single piece rather than an assemblage of parts, like a bust carved from a single block of stone. He was the ranking detective in the squad, number three in terms of seniority behind the commander and Conroy, but probably higher in the eyes of his peers who saw him as a “good cop” in every sense of the adjective.
Hart noticed Michael and greeted him warmly. He escorted Michael to a chair with one arm crooked in the air a foot or so above Michael’s shoulders, protectively, as if he were shepherding an invalid or an idiot to a wheelchair.
“Where is everybody?” Michael asked.
Hart’s eyes swept across the empty room. The office was lightly staffed: eight detectives and eight sergeants for an entire city, working staggered shifts, with cases assigned to whoever happened to be working when the call came in. It was not a job for deskmen. “Out working,” Hart said, “what do you think?”
“We alone here?”
“For the moment.”
“Well, maybe we could go somewhere? In private. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, no. Never better. I have some information. I’d rather not be attached to it.”
“So why’d you call me? You’ve got a houseful of cops over there. I thought Brendan Conroy was…well, whatever.”
“There’s all different kinds of cops, Tom. Brendan’s not the kind I need right now. You are.”
“What kind is that?”
“Kind I can trust. Tom, you knew my dad. I need someone who’ll handle things the way he would if he was here, for me and my brothers.”
A little riffle stirred Hart’s features. “Alright, come on.”
They shut themselves in the commander’s office at the end of the room. It was the same office where, months before, Michael himself had interrogated the giant, Arthur Nast, and linked him at the least to one of the Strangler murders. Behind the little mirror on the wall was a peephole, Michael recalled. The intimacy of a sub rosa meeting in here was, or might be, an illusion. But what could you do? You had to trust someone, and Tom Hart was as good as a priest. Better, actually: a priest with a size-thirteen boot and a nine-millimeter in his desk, both of which might come in handy if it turned out God was otherwise occupied at a prayerful moment.
“Alright, then. So what was so important?”
“It’s about the Strangler.”
“Not our case. You know that. Take it to Wamsley.”
“This is a case he doesn’t know what to do with: Amy Ryan. All Wamsley has is DeSalvo. And even DeSalvo can’t figure out a way to confess to it; he was in Bridgewater when it happened.”
“Well, it’s still the A.G.’s case until I hear different.”
“It’s an unsolved murder in the city of Boston, Tom. You want to leave it to that fruitcake so he can call in a psychic to solve it for him?”
The fruitcake in question, of course, was Wamsley, who had in fact hired a psychic to fly into Boston early in the Strangler investigation. It had fallen to Tom Hart to escort this man discreetly around the city, even bunk with him at a hotel in Lexington. The whole thing had made Wamsley a laughingstock among cops, who had more colorful names for George Wamsley than fruitcake.
“Alright, Michael. No harm in listening, I guess.”
“I have a friend with an interest in the case. Someone who’s completely trustworthy.”
“Who? I need a name.”
“This is in confidence. It’s someone close to me.”
“I still need the name. You can trust me, you know that.”
“My friend can open doors.”
“Ah. That one.”
“You remember Kurt Lindstrom? He was a suspect in some of the stranglings.”
“The symphony guy. Othello.”
“Right. Well, my friend has, by…um…arguably extralegal means, he got into Lindstrom’s apartment. He wants you to know what he found there. He says Lindstrom has bloodstained panties. At least it looked like blood. He says the panties are big, like a girdle, like the kind an old woman would wear. And there’s magazines, porno but not the regular stuff-women getting raped and killed.”
“So? The guy likes porn. So do I. So do you.”
“It’s not just that. My friend says there’s pictures there that look like they come straight from the Strangler murders: women tied, tortured, strangled with ropes tied off in a bow. Lindstrom lives on Symphony Road, right around the corner from Helena Jalelian, the first victim.”
“Jalakian.”
“Jalakian. She was a symphony fan, remember? She must have seen him at some point. She probably would have let him in. And the alley behind her apartment goes right down to Lindstrom’s building. He could have strangled her and got home without ever showing his face on the street.”
“And what do you-what does your friend-suggest we do?”
“Get a warrant, today. Put all this in an affidavit, get a warrant, and get in there.”
“Get a warrant for a murder DeSalvo’s already confessed to?”
“Confessed isn’t convicted. Come on, Tom, you see where this is headed. There isn’t going to be a trial. Wamsley doesn’t have a case. There’s no evidence against DeSalvo. The confession’s not admissible. Even if it were, it’s not enough to convict. The guy was in a mental hospital when he confessed. So Wamsley’ll let it drop, DeSalvo’ll rot in Walpole, and everybody goes home happy. Meanwhile Lindstrom is still out on the street. Are you going to leave him out there, when I’ve just told you he has Helena Jalakian’s bloody girdle in his sock drawer?”
“You don’t know either that it’s Helena’s or that it’s bloody.”
“How much proof do you need, Tom, before you start investigating?”
“Michael. No judge is going to open up those Strangler cases without Wamsley’s say-so. There hasn’t been a strangling in nearly six months, since Amy Ryan. I know DeSalvo was in custody when Amy was killed. Still, it’s been a long quiet period. Now, if you could link this guy to Amy somehow, we might have something. Otherwise, I’ll never get a warrant with just that tip; your ‘friend’ is a thief.”
“Who among us is without sin?”
“Not him, certainly.”
“Look, Tom, he asked me to give you the information. You do what you think is right with it. It’s up to you.”
“Tell you what: I’ll look into it, see if I can get the Strangler Bureau people to reconsider at least that Jalakian case. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Nobody wants to talk about this anymore. The Amy Ryan case, obviously that’s a different thing. But you haven’t made that link yet.”
“Alright. I’ll tell him. And you’ll keep my friend out of it, right, Tom?”
“I’ll keep him out of it. Tell him, from now on leave the police work to the police.”
48
The view from Kurt Lindstrom’s bay window at mid-afternoon:
A half block away, on the opposite side of Hemenway Street, people clustered at a bus stop. There were eight of them, four young women, apparently students; one young man in a beatnik-style hooded overshirt and floppy- brimmed leather hat; one man in a business suit; a heavyset Negro woman with a shopping bag from Jordan Marsh; and a thin man in a navy Boston Edison repairman’s uniform. A bus arrived from the right. It filled the view, a wall of sooty fluted steel and parallelogram windows. After a few seconds the air brakes sighed and the bus pulled
